Adventure

It’s Friday night and we can here the beating of drums from across the water. If you look carefully you can also see the lights spinning around in the distance. We’ve already been 5 times but it never gets old. We decide to load up the older kids and we pile in the truck with their cousins and aunties and drive down the road. It takes less than 10 minutes to drive to the Beach Bar where there is a free fire show every Friday night. It’s the same place we go for $10 pizzas and an outdoor movie on Tuesday nights but nobody ever gets tired of watching.

I promise myself this time that I’ll just enjoy the show without filming any of it. After all the sure sign of a tourist is taking out their fancy phones and videotaped EVERYTHING…sigh. It was too tempting. The sparks fly and the entire sky feels likes its lit up with music, people and fire. It’s actually very exciting and the crowd goes wild. I have officially resisted for as long as I possibly can before I pull out my phone and take a few minutes of fire dancing filming. Now that I’ve made a little movie the whole thing is off my chest and I won’t have to film it next time 🙂 The Fire Dancing Show in Port Vila Vanuatu is AWESOME!

Today we packed up all the kids, grabbed some fruit, towels and swim gear and visited a beach. It’s the same thing we’ve done a hundred times since we’ve been here. But I saw something different that really spoke to my heart.

Once we arrived at a beach hidden down some random jungle road and the as the minutes turned into hours I pinpointed what I love about living somewhere warm. There are simply so many things to do OUTSIDE! I MISS BEING OUTSIDE! I really think God created a beautiful earth for us to enjoy, but when i’m stuck inside for 8 months of the year it’s depressing!

Being on the beach today everyone just played together. It didn’t matter their age differences or interests. There wasn’t this impending feeling like winter is coming and all the fun is going to soon be over. In fact we are right in the middle of winter and we just barely graduated from sheets to thin blankets at night, everyone still jumping in the ocean for night time swims and walking around in their swimsuits. Ahhh 🙂

Oh, I also have to confess how much I love the endless CREATIVITY of kids that are home-schooled. A pile of rocks and sea glass quickly turns into an ocean and landing pad for a new game and kids of all ages laugh and play together. I know that lots of kids that aren’t home-schooled are awesomely creative, but I am a bit biased towards all these fantastic peeps who joined me for One Day in Paradise today and they all happened to be home-schooled so sorry for the brag 🙂

The oldest girls took a hike through the jungle with a group of their cousins and local friends. All the locals knew that the plant was to be avoided but they forgot to tell my girls. Two of the girls ended up falling down and getting covered in a tropical stinging plant #should’vewornlongershorts. The sting lasts from a week to a month and the only remedy is to find the plant that stung you and crack open it’s stem, spreading the sap on the sting. Here’s the report!